Skolbera is an independent ranking of internationally accredited schools around the world. Private and state. Built on data anyone can check, not on who tells the better story about themselves. We add countries and schools step by step, so that every entry is verified rather than merely uploaded.
Icelandic has the verb bera. It means "to carry": to carry a load, to carry responsibility, to carry witness. In the courtroom phrase bera vitni it means literally "to give evidence" - to say what you saw and to answer for what you said.
The same verb gives bera saman - "to bring together", to set one thing against another. That is exactly what a ranking does: it takes schools that cannot be compared by eye and brings them into one frame of reference.
And bera is also a she-bear. Not the bear but her: the one who raises and guards. In the Scandinavian languages the word has always stood next to the care of the young, not next to strength.
Add the Icelandic skóli, school, and you get Skolbera: bring schools together, answer for what you said, and do it for the sake of those you are raising. Three meanings in one word is rare luck for a name.
A parent choosing an international school runs into the same thing every time: every school has a beautiful website, and there is nothing to compare them by. Accreditations sound alike and mean different things. Not every school publishes a price. What stands behind the words "a strong academic programme" cannot be checked at all.
And the decision is made once and for years, while the price of getting it wrong is measured not in money but in one particular child's childhood.
The ranking today holds 1296 schools in 19 countries: Azerbaijan, Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Vietnam, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Kyrgyzstan, Paraguay, Serbia, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Uruguay, Montenegro, Chile. For every school we checked its accreditations against the official registry of the organisation that granted them, went through the website and wrote down what it says about fees, facilities, clubs and safety. And we score them all by one formula, which is out in the open. The list grows every week.
We score only what can be checked. If a school has no data for a criterion, we do not invent it, we write "no data". Criteria where hardly any school has data are switched off entirely, so not all nine are live today. A score computed from three schools out of 1296 would mislead the reader, and that is the whole reason.
Silence buys no advantage. A school with no published price gets the market median on that criterion, not a free pass. Holding information back is not punished, but it does not help either.
The formula is public. Weights, sources and the order of the calculation are on the methodology page. Any score can be recomputed by hand.
No review appears on the site without a person reading it. You do not need an account to leave one - what protects the site from gaming is not registration but moderation before publication: we read every review ourselves first. Gaming hurts the reader before anyone else. The rules for publication are here.
This is not a slogan but the condition on which the project exists. A ranking where a line can be bought is useless from the day the first line is sold, and parents sense that faster than one might think.
So a school has no way to move its position except one: publish more data about itself that can be checked. A school can send us its current fee list, its exam results, its student-teacher ratio - and that will show in the score, because criteria start working. We give schools no other lever, and we do not intend to.
The project runs on the founder's own money. When it starts earning, we will write here what exactly it earns from and how that is kept apart from the ranking.
The data is gathered by people and by algorithms, and it does contain mistakes: a fee that has moved on, an accreditation recorded wrongly, a school we missed. We fix such things quickly and without argument, if you show us where exactly we are wrong.
Schools always have the right of reply: it is published next to the material it answers. How to reach us is set out in the terms.
Write to us: hello@skolbera.com